Calvin College will host
a graduation ceremony for its Entrada
Scholars Program on Friday, July 16 at 11 am in Gezon Auditorium
on its campus.

The Entrada Scholars Program
at Calvin College offers ethnic minority high school students a "gateway"
to the future: the opportunity to experience college learning and living
while earning college credit. The heart of the Entrada Scholars Program
is a regular three-week Calvin College summer school course that Entrada
students take with the Calvin students.

This Friday's ceremony will
mark a passage for a total of 57 students of color from Grand Rapids,
Muskegon, Holland and beyond (New York, Florida, California, Illinois,
New Jersey, Pennsylvania plus such locales as Guam, Austria and Japan).

It will be an emotional finale
to a month-long adventure that sees the high school students not only
take a regular class, but also live in a residence hall, worship and
grow spiritually together, eat in the dining hall, study in the library,
shoot hoops in the gym, order late-night pizzas, do a service project,
get a heavy dose of computer skills -- in other words, have a typical
college experience.

"We want students
to get a true sense of what college -- particularly Calvin -- is all
about," says director Rhae Ann Booker (above). "At the end
of Entrada, students have taken an actual Calvin class for credit and
they've lived on campus for a month. The Entrada experience gives them
a good look at what college life entails and what it takes to succeed
in college. It also gives them a taste of what Calvin's unique brand
of Christian education is all about."

Entrada Scholars are assigned
an academic coach, a trained teacher, who attends classes with them
in the morning and leads a study period (Academic Coaching session)
with the scholars following the class. In other words, Academic Coaches
model and teach scholars how to be successful in their specific course
and in college in general. As a result the Entrada scholars often do
better in their courses than the regular college students.

Entrada has had strong success
in terms of getting high schools students to move on to college with
a 96% success rate, something both Meijer and VanLunen resonated with
in deciding to make their gifts.

Since its inception in 1991,
about 350 students have completed Entrada. Some have gone on to Calvin;
some attended other colleges. Almost all have pursued some sort of post
high school education.